The Dutch word for “buddy picture” is “vriendenfilm.” They take their shot at the genre with a cop/buddy action comedy, “Almost Cops,” whose title in Dutch is “Bad Boas,” a cute pun.

That’s funnier than anything in this stunningly unsurprising stroll through Cliche City. I basically can’t list anybody in the credits beyond the leads without giving away the plot. Three credited screenwriters and three “script contribution” writers do the worst job in living memory at hiding the “mystery” at the heart of their tale of Rotterdam corruption, drug dealing, gang wars and the Community Service Officers out of their depth but out to crack the case.

Long review short for our friends who no longer wear wooden shoes, “Het is rot.”

Jandino Asporaat is Ramon, a “cut these people some slack” CSO who’s inclined to let little old dog ladies off the hook for not picking up after their pets and think the best of teen truants who are already mixed-up with the wrong crowd.

He’s got the department de-escalation speech memorized. He’d better, because all he’s armed with is pepper spray, a live-streaming bodycam and a “tiny little flashlight” (in Dutch with subtitles, or dubbed into English) to defend himself.

Yeah, he’s disrespected. The locals call his kind “Smurfs” and “Paw Patrol” thanks to their uniforms, their do-gooder indulgence of miscreants and their powerlessness. Hell, Ramon’s even mugged at one point.

His younger half-brother (Yannick Jozefzoon) is the one living up to their dead hero-cop father’s tradition. Kevin tries to indulge his sibling’s dream of a teen center to keep kids on his beat out of trouble by contributing a billiards table.

But Kevin’s the one involved in stakeouts and dangerous work. It’s made more dangerous by having a reckless, swaggering partner, Jack (Werner Kolf). Their coke-smuggling stakeout on the docks gets Kevin killed. His bungling gets Jack demoted to bottom level of the police heirarchy. And naturally, Jack’s new “partner” is the half-brother of the undercover cop killed right in front of him.

Not that anybody’s telling Ramon this.

Jack’s two-fisted, dive-right-in approach to even this level of “ticket or no ticket” policing will never work as a CSO. And he can’t muscle his way back onto Kevin’s murder case. Ramon has to be pushed and pushed before he’ll get worked-up enough to try and punish his brother’s killer.

The scattered laughs come from Ramon’s bend-over-backwards decency. He interrogates teen suspects by beating himself up while handcuffed to one. He’s quick to apologize, slow to anger and kind of the model “almost cop” that Jack’s detective chief (Ramona Vrede, fed-up and funny) advises him to treat “like slow toddlers or something.”

The screenplay takes the time to set up Ramon’s squad as “types” — the exhibitionist/woman-repellent hulk, the conspiracy nut, the Turk whose solution to every problem is “soup” and others. But precious little is done with that set-up.

American viewers may get a kick out of how “nice” and polite Dutch police are compared to the armor-plated hotheads the U.S. is famous for.

But getting comedy out of a Kevin Hart “type” (Asporaat, who is related to one of the screenwriters) paired-up with an Ice Cube (closer to Idris Elba) “type” proves a lot more difficult than you’d hope.

Hart’s screeching way with a line and the faces he makes made “Ride Along” work in ways “Almost Cops” never does.

We can guess who is doing what and who will turn out to be pulling the strings the moment we meet those characters.

“Almost Cops” winds up as almost a buddy comedy, and certainly not one that works.

Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence, profanity

Cast: Jandino Asporaat, Werner Kolf,
Florence Vos Weeda, Ramona Vrede and Yannick Jozefzoon

Credits: Directed by Gonzalo Fernandez Carmona, scripted by Kenneth Asporaat, Joost Reijmers and Thomas van der Ree. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36